Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Some New Student Blog Posts Of Note

Do I have to try Tumblr now? I teach several writing courses in which I require students to maintain personal blogs.

My rationale is that someone who aspires to be a professional communicator needs to be comfortable with sharing personal insights on a regular basis—and blogging is an overt way to publicly do that and also get used to the idea of regularly performing the art of writing before the world.

Blogging exposes the young writer to the possibility of abuse, unfortunately—the internet can be a harsh place—but also the possibility of unexpected success.

In my class, most students gravitated to blogger, although one young woman set her flag into the island of Tumblr. She didn’t exactly claim it as her own, but I guess she did stake out a little territory in that new land.

I’ll be watching with interest to see what develops in the blogosphere. In the meantime, her are just a few of what I consider to be the top student posts:

  • “An insight of mine” has a somewhat awkward title, but I found the post to be very engaging and interesting. I don’t know if this blogger will maintain this interesting voice of writing nonfiction like it was short story fiction, but we’ll see. The post is clearly heartfelt, and I like it because of that.
  • There is a very different tone in this post. The video was indeed interesting, and the student takes on a trip with her. I encourage students to make their blogs visually interesting, and this one example.
  • So is this. The rule of cocktail party etiquette is that, when making chitchat with strangers, you don’t discuss politics or religion. This post on this visually interesting blog is a two-fer—it right away violates both of the cocktail party rules. But it’s such clear and direct writing, we’ll take it.

Other students had interesting blog posts, too, and I’ll try to feature more as the semester goes on.  Keep on writing, students. I anxiously await what you come up with.

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